Touched by an Alien (24 page)

This hit me in my stomach. I knew several agents personally now, one very personally. The reality of what they did for a living washed over me. Any one of them could be killed by these superbeings, just as a human could. For all I knew, one of their number had died at the courthouse—I hadn’t asked, after all.

Martini came over. “Stop freaking her out; she’s upset enough. None of us died yesterday.” He put his hand on my neck and started massaging again. “No one can agree on what to look at first,” he added with a sigh.

“I know what I want to look at.” I did? “I want to read what the Ancients said about the parasites, how they came into being.” Why did I want to read this?

“Okay.” Martini gave me a funny look, but he relayed my request to Gower.

Claudia and Lorraine sat down with me while the text rolled up onto the screen. Gower handed me what looked like a superduper computer mouse. “You control the speed with this button,” he pointed to a round knob on the top.

The text was choppy—you could tell it had been translated by people who had no idea of what the original language sounded like. Dad stood behind me, reading along. Mostly it sounded as though the Ancients were trying to explain who they were, so their warnings would carry weight.

“Can we see the original text?” Dad asked, his tone thoughtful.

“Why? It’s in an alien language,” White replied.

“It translated, didn’t it?” Dad didn’t sound huffy. He sounded as though he was getting excited. “I just want to see it.”

A thought occurred. “Um, Dad? What is it that you do for a living? I mean really, not what you’ve told me all my life.”

Mom was in front of me and to the left. I saw her give a small nod, and I assumed Dad had just asked permission to share the truth.

“I’m a cryptologist,” he admitted. This was a far cry from college history professor, which was what I’d been told all my life. “But,” he added hastily, “I do teach at the university.”

“As your cover. Which agency do you work for?” Long silence. “Dad? I mean it, I want to know.” I didn’t turn to look at him. I had a feeling he wouldn’t tell me if he had to look me in the eyes.

“NASA,” he said finally.

“NASA. In their extraterrestrial division, right?” I’d never heard of this division, but after a day with the boys from A-C, I had a good idea it existed.

“Right.” He sighed. “I don’t see the kind of action your mother does. I don’t see action at all, really. Cryptology isn’t a field job. I didn’t know we had ETs on the planet, though—that’s on a need-to-know basis—”

“And you didn’t need to know. Got it.” Nice to see other people besides my mother were withholding information from my father. Of course, I’d spent my entire life believing he was a tenured history professor at Arizona State University, so clearly Dad was also into the need-to-know lifestyle. Chuckie and I had even taken his classes. Of course, most of his classes were taught by grad students. As I considered this, history professor seemed like a great cover.

“Right. My group works more with the transmissions we pick up from the other inhabited planets.”

“Not just the Alpha Centauri planets, right?” I was taking this remarkably well. I wondered how long my calm would last.

“Right. This is the only alien text we’ve got. The rest are all audio only. It’s why I want to see it.” He was lying, I could tell—I’d lived with him the majority of my life, after all. The big lies, sure, both parents had done those well, but they’d had them in place before I showed up. But the little lies, not so much. Dad, in particular, had a lot of clues when he wasn’t telling the truth. I knew there was more to why he wanted to see the text than curiosity. But I wanted to see it, too.

White shrugged and Gower left the room, presumably to go order up the actual volume. While we waited, I kept on scrolling through. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I just had a feeling there was something no one was picking up.

I reached the part about a sun dying, and I slowed down. The description was sad, really. A well-inhabited planetary system had circled a star that went supernova with almost no warning. One day, everything was normal. The next, the star exploded. In a big bang.

I backed up. It literally said it—“big bang.” There was text in parentheses after this saying “supernova.”

“How do I mark something I want to come back to?” I asked Lorraine.

She reached over to the mouse and pushed something. The paragraph I was reading was now backlit in yellow.

“Nice, thanks. The words in parens, what are they?”

“Areas where the translation team wasn’t sure of the accuracy,” Claudia replied. “The information in the parentheses is the most likely guess.”

“Okay.” I kept on reading. The Ancients were describing what happened to the people on the planets.

“Highlight this, please,” I asked Lorraine. “Dad, I want you to find the passage that corresponds to this in the original.”

“You got it, kitten.” He sounded as if he knew where I was headed. I hoped so, because I wasn’t sure of my direction yet.

I kept scrolling. Many references to the big bang, to the portions that could live without the body—now only called parasites for ease of reading—searching for a place they couldn’t find. Descriptions of horrors to come when the parasites found their new hosts. Details of why to avoid the parasites—death, destruction, horror—no details on how to live with them. Several references to the pain the parasites caused when they joined with a new host.

The book shifted, and now it was talking about the Ancients, how they had avoided the parasites, and how they wanted to ensure all the other planets would as well. They gave detailed instructions on how to keep the parasites away. Planetary protections were listed side by side with what sounded like the standard clean-living plan—be a good person, don’t do bad things, don’t get angry. Lots and lots of don’t get angry and similar advice. Keep your cool, that was the Ancients’ watchword for this section.

“Who did the translations? I know you said it took a supercomputer. Did any humans have involvement?”

“Some,” White replied. “Most were our people, though humans created the computer program.”

Gower and several women came in, including Beverly, the one with the boring speaking voice. The women were there, it was clear, to protect the original text, because they weren’t allowing Gower to touch it. The situation and my request were explained.

Beverly appeared to be in charge, at least of the book. She moved it in front of me and Dad and reverently opened the pages. She turned carefully to the part I’d asked for. It was very near the start of the book.

Dad didn’t try to touch it, he just leaned over my shoulder to stare. “It’s all columns and rows, like a spreadsheet. Did you read it right to left, left to right, up to down or down to up?”

“We tried all of them,” Beverly replied. She was still monotonal, and I was glad I felt reasonably rested.

“Which one worked?” Dad sounded as if he were vibrating behind me.

“None of them. It was an algorithm.” Beverly sounded annoyed.

“Even or uneven?” Dad leaned on me now, trying to get as close to the text as he could.

“Uneven,” Beverly admitted. “It was very odd. We had to run a huge number of variations through the computer to come up with anything coherent.”

Dad stopped leaning on me. “Thought so.” He bent down now. “If you’re going where I think you are, chances are good you’re right. You want to suggest it or shall I?” he whispered.

I thought about it. “Let me. If I’m wrong, you mop up,” I whispered back.

He patted my shoulder. “I’m betting on genetics.”

I cleared my throat and sat up straight. No time like the present to insult your hosts, after all. “I think your translation’s wrong.”

BEDLAM’S AN INTERESTING WORD
. I would have said the superbeing sprouting killer wings caused bedlam. But that was before I’d shared my hunch with the A-C crew in the room.

Every one of them, from White and Beverly all the way to Claudia and Lorraine, was talking, trying to speak over each other, countering my statement with a great deal of hyperbole.

Dad patted my shoulder. “That’s my girl,” he said in my ear.

I looked around, waiting for the crowd to calm down. Only two of them weren’t freaking out—Martini and Christopher. They were both looking at me, and they both looked curious but not upset.

The room wasn’t quieting, and I wondered if it was because no one actually wanted to hear my theory. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time.

Christopher looked around, and I saw his eyes narrow. “Everyone, shut up,” he snarled. I wouldn’t have thought they could hear him, but to a person the mouths snapped closed. Nasty seemed to have its benefits. He looked at me. “Please explain what you mean.”

I waited until they were all looking at me. “It’s not a textbook or a how to stop the invasion manual. It’s a religious text.”

“Oh, come on,” Gower said with a laugh. “They came to warn us, Kitty. It’s a manual about the threat and how to protect ourselves from it.”

I shook my head. “No. They came to convert us. They were missionaries. And that’s their version of the Bible.” I stood—it made me feel more like I could escape if they all jumped me. “It’s an understandable mistake. Your religion doesn’t think like theirs. But ours do.”

I looked at Martini. “You don’t believe in Hell, right?” He nodded. “And you also believe in evolution, not a creation story, right?” Another nod. I saw other heads in the room nodding as well. “And a computer is only as good as what gets programmed into it. I’m sure no one, A-C or human, thought to include the Bible in the computer’s data banks for this. After all, this was a scientific threat, not a religious one.”

I scrolled back to the first part of the text that had stopped me. “This talks about an explosion, a big bang. You interpreted it as a supernova—as the literal death of a star.” I looked over to Dad. “But I interpret this as the Ancients’ version of either the beginning of the universe or, more likely, the Garden of Eden.”

He smiled at me. “An uneven algorithm creates challenges because you can get an algorithm that’s close, but not perfect. Just as they did here.” He pointed to the open book. “The problem with breaking a code is that you need to find the commonalities. Those are easier to identify the more text you have. But it’s a common mistake to go with the first translation that finally makes sense. You did a good job,” he added. “It’s just not perfect.”

“I’m sure you could perfect it,” Beverly said, and her voice finally had a tone to it—deep sarcasm.

“Probably,” Dad said with a shrug. “You’ve done the hard part. The next iterations would be the fine-tuning. That you didn’t do.”

“We double-checked,” Beverly said hotly.

“I’m sure you did. But you checked only against your original idea of what the book was.” Dad had his lecture mode on, I could tell. “In order to be completely accurate, you’d have to go in with no preconceived notions.”

Mom must have picked up the likelihood of an impending lecture as well. “Sol, you want to let Kitty finish?”

“Oh, sure.” Dad looked at me sheepishly. “Go ahead.”

I scrolled to the text that had really stopped me. “I’m going to read this out loud, with some word substitutions. ‘They were stripped apart, and the souls were freed. These sailed through space, searching for Eden. But because of their evilness they could not find it and so began to search for another place to live.’ Sound familiar?”

“Adam and Eve being cast out of paradise,” Reader said. “The fall of man.”

“You could substitute Heaven for Eden, and Hell for another place to live. Same idea.” I looked around. “Our world has flood stories in every culture, so Noah’s Ark has a basis in reality. Almost all our Biblical stories are rooted in some fact. I’m guessing there really was a big bang, a supernova, if you will, that caused this story. The parasites are real, that’s for sure. I think they’re sentient, and they believe they’re in Hell.”

“Flying through space alone for millennia, no company, no warmth, nothing familiar. Yeah, that would be Hell,” Martini said quietly.

“And your religion doesn’t believe in a Hell, so your translators weren’t thinking that way. You do believe in souls and that they can be redeemed, but you don’t have the creation stories we do; you all believe in evolution.”

“Our world’s creation story is based on our double suns,” Christopher interjected. “But the view is they created life together, not that they destroyed anything to bring it about. It’s not scientifically logical, though, at least not in the way it’s described. Which is part of why we don’t agree with the theory.”